Wildlife Update : Campaign to fend off invasion by alien species

These creatures, plants and animals in the wrong place due mostly to human intervention, have had a major impact in New Zealand, Australia and United Kingdon…. I have seen this impact with my own eyes!

Alien species are attacking crops and causing billions of dollars worth of damage to the economy even though detection rates have increased fourfold since 2002. China Daily reports.

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There were more than 320,000 detections of 3,400 harmful species at entry ports in the first nine months of last year.

Losses caused by 13 major invasive species, including pinewood nematode disease and water hyacinth, were up, according to Wan Fanghao, a specialist of alien invasive species at the Ministry of Agriculture.

Screening procedures at points of entry are not totally secure. “Many ports just carry out spot checks, so some enter,” Huang said. “Honestly speaking, we can only slow down the invasion but we cannot stop it entirely.”

But a defense system is being established. China revised its list of foreign plant quarantine pests in 2007 and the number of harmful species increased from 95 to 439. The Ministry of Agriculture also said it is committed to accomplishing a 100 percent detection rate and fighting any outbreaks with effective quarantine measures.

Invasive species, while free of natural predators, may find it difficult to survive in China, experts said.

“They will encounter a completely different environment, so the spread will be limited by natural conditions in the new country,” Xu said.

Zheng Fengtian, an expert in rural studies at Renmin University of China, also said the invasion, so far, is relatively minor given the scale of global exchanges of seeds and grains.